Elizabeth C. Traugott

Elizabeth Closs Traugott is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and English at Stanford University.

Traugott has done research in historical syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, lexicalization, socio-historical linguistics, and linguistics and literature. She is the author of Discourse Structuring Markers in English, co-author of Constructionalization and Constructional Changes, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, among other works. Her current research focuses on ways to bring the theories of grammaticalization and construction grammar to bear on accounts of micro-changes.

She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. She received her Ph.D. in English Language at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Dar-es-Salaam, and York University before joining the faculty at Stanford.